


Axis Mundi

by aeoleus



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Everybody Lives, F/M, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, I care about one thing and one thing only, PERIOD END OF SENTENCE, THis is a goddamn fix it fic, and THAT IS TONY STARK BEING HAPPY, fuck u russo brothers with ur cinematic arcs or whatever, pepper potts is the strongest avenger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-02-26 23:21:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18726907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeoleus/pseuds/aeoleus
Summary: "The axis mundi, in certain philosophies, is the world center, or the connection between Heaven and Earth."And there it is, on a leveled battlefield in New York.He's just a man in a can, with a daughter and a wife, and six infinity stones on his hand. If there was ever a connection between heaven and earth, it was here, and it was now.





	1. Chapter 1

  
_"The axis mundi, in certain philosophies, is the world center, or the connection between Heaven and Earth."_

* * *

 

And there it is, on a leveled battlefield in New York.  
He's just a man in a can, with a daughter and a wife, and six infinity stones on his hand. If there was ever a connection between heaven and earth, it was here, and it was now.  
  
There is no doubt in Tony's mind that he will not survive this.  
"I am inevitable," Thanos snarls, starting towards him.  
"And I," Tony raises his arm- the gauntlet, he's wielding the gauntlet- "am Iron Man."  
He snaps.

And then there's nothing but pain,

pain,

pain.

courses up his hand and through his shoulder.

burns through the metal of his suit and creeps up his neck.

Steals away his air and sight, and half the world disintegrates from view.

* * *

  
"Mr Stark- we did it." It's the kid- Peter. He really should just call him Peter. Tony manages to open one eye, and there's Peter. He's looking shaky, is he crying? And then Peter's being moved, and

Pepper.

Tony wants to reach out to her, grasps her hand. He can't move. Pepper smiles, there are tears in her eyes.

 _Don't cry, Pep_ , he tries to say. It doesn't make it out of his mouth.

"Tony, it's okay." She whispers. Some of her hair is falling into her face. "We're gonna be okay."

She puts a hand on his reactor, and by some Sisyphean feat, Tony puts his on top of hers.

"You can rest now."

Tony breathes.

And then he doesn't.

He expected this.  
14 million futures.  
This is the one. He's okay with this, he really is.

* * *

  
Apparently, however, others aren't.

Because Tony wakes up, six days later, with a tube down his throat, and Pepper asleep on a couch next to him, 

  
"Mmph," He tries to say, except it doesn't work so well.

He briefly considers that this is the afterlife, that he died, but Tony doesn't think any version of the afterlife would include gagging around a plastic tube shoved down your mouth and an increasingly horrible burn spreading through his chest. Unless he's in hell. Which, given the shit he used to get up to when he was younger, is a real possibility for him. 

"MMPH," he says with more urgency. Some alarm goes off, and Pepper's eyes fly open. She's sporting some wicked bruising around her cheekbone.  
Tony thinks she's never looked more beautiful.  
"Tony," She breathes. She stumbles towards him, and then her hands are on his cheeks, her lips on his forehead. "We didn't know if you'd wake up. But you always seem to be pulling off the impossible, huh?"

Tony wants to cry. He wants to get this tube out of his mouth, he wants to collapse into Pepper's arms and just cry.

Instead, Helen Cho walks in and seems mildly happy to see Tony awake.

She asks him if he remembers what happened?

 _The snap._ He wants to say. Instead, he just nods. He tries to point at the tube in his throat, but instead he finds that he no longer has a hand.

Huh.

He tries to crane his head to the left, and finds that there's bandages covering the left side of his face all the way down his chest, where there's simply a stump of a shoulder. Nothing else.

He wants to scream, a little.

He doesn't. Can't.

Pepper seems to realize his horror, as she takes his right hand and squeezes it tightly.  
"There was too much damage, honey. It was your arm or your life." She says quietly.

If he was eleven years younger, Tony would have snapped at her, that she should have let him die than mutilate him like that (maybe only half meaning it. It was always hard to be mad at Pepper).

But a lot has happened since those days. And now, Tony closes his eyes, and thinks of Morgan. Pepper. Peter. Happy. Rhodey.  
Okay.

Pepper creases her brows, bites her lip. Looks like she's been crying a lot.

They take the tube out, and Tony throws up. He notes somewhat dully, as terrible, pulling pain shoots up his side, that this doesn't quite seem very "man-who-just-saved-the-universe" behavior.

And then Peter comes in, Rhodey holding him by one shoulder. He looks a little haggard, wearing clothes that are hanging off of him. He starts to cry as soon as he comes in, and stands in front of Tony like he doesn't know what to do. Ah, Jesus.

"C'mere, Pete." Tony rasps.

Peter flies forward and wraps his arms carefully around Tony, his sobs moving his shoulders up and down. Tony can make out _you_ , and _scared,_ and _me_ in between the sobs.  
"I'm sorry I scared you, kid."  
Peter moves back, wrapping his arms around himself and looking down like he's ashamed of his behavior.

"You saved us." Peter says. Tony waits for the rest of the sentence to come flying out of Peter's mouth- he's never been succinct once in his life- but he just stays silent.  
"I did what I thought needing doing." Tony says quietly.  
He feels someone grasps his shoulder, and looks up to Rhodey, who's got a wicked scar across his eyebrow.  
"No one else could have done it, Tony."  
The vibe is too serious and Tony is starting to feel self-conscious of the tears that seem to be rolling down his cheek without any permission.

And then Pepper comes back into the room, Morgan on her hip, and Tony can't even bring himself to care anymore.

"Morgoona!" He croons hoarsely, the smile that comes to his lips painful and worth it.  
"Daddy!" She shrieks, clambering onto his bed and kissing his nose.  
He's in pain with Morgan's unconscious moving, but the way she cuddles down into him, her little hands encircling his wrist as though she couldn't care less that he has one less hand now, is 14 million times more healing to him than any pain meds Cho could force on him.  
"I missed you." She mumbles.  
"I missed you too, Lovebug." Tony says. He knows he's crying again, 'cause Pepper comes to thumb away the tears, her own eyes red. She sits on the edge of the bed with them. "Daddy just had to go away for a little while. But I'm back now, and I'm not going away again."   
"I love you 3000." She says, flashing a bright smile at him. 

This moment, here, is the true center of the world. 

  
"I love you 3000." Tony repeats, looking at his daughter's dark eyes, and into Pepper's. And if his voice cracks, well, there's no one there to hear it but his family.

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

Bruce and Strange are able to detox a good amount of the gamma radiation from Tony's burns, with some help from Cho's cradle and some modified extremis.

  
Tony finds out they're in Wakanda, that T'Challa has graciously been hosting everyone and that the palace has practically been turned into a makeshift hospital. From his little room, with Morgan playing with legos at the foot of his bed and Pepper attempting to run the company from her phone, Tony takes in the state of the world.

Not that they were particularly stable- the SHIELD leak back in 2014 had done a good job of destabilizing a solid chunk of governments- but the decimation and sudden reappearance of 3.5 billion people has managed to nearly throw the world into chaos. Homes have been repossessed, whole markets have been overwhelmed with half their customers suddenly using them again, food has become scarce, and jobs are few and in between.

Tony wants to help, he does-

But the pain.

He would never admit it to anyone.  
But there are nights that he lies awake, the third degree burns that have dominated a majority of his left side seeming to spread and burn like he's being dipped in boiling oil continuously, and he wishes that they had let him die.

  
But then morning comes and Peter grins at him while saying something young and stupid that makes Tony's head spin with the ridiculousness of it all, and Morgan clambers onto his bed to very softly kiss his forehead, and Pepper cards her hands through his hair, and Rhodey reads some article about the reappearance of a young child thought lost forever reappearing to him, and Tony can breathe.

Time passes.

The burns fade into bumpy, jagged skin that Pepper runs her fingers over and, when he cracks some self-conscious joke about not being handsome anymore, retorts with crinkled eyes that it was bold of him to assume that she ever found him attractive in the first place.  
(The way she leans forward to kiss his chapped, healing lips, staring at him with full eyes, lets Tony know that isn't quite true.)

He meets T'Challa's younger sister Shuri, a funny, whip-smart kid who disappeared with her brother, but chatters incessantly to Tony as they discuss options for a prosthetic. Tony thinks she and Pete would get on like a house on fire.

* * *

  
He walks for the first time after several weeks and sees Steve at the other end of the gym, watching him with crossed arms and a very pensive look on his face. He ignores his Physical Therapist's reprimands and begins to walk over to him.  
"What's wrong, sourpuss?" Tony asks as he reaches Steve, who's now warily eyeing him up like he's not sure how Tony's going to react. But then Tony reaches him, and lurches forward a bit, off-balance by the weight of exactly one arm. Steve immediately reacts and helps Tony sit down.

  
Steve sits down next to him, silently watching Tony fiddle with a display from his watch monitoring vitals.  
"I, uh, have a lot that I want to say." Steve starts.  
"Well, out with it, Mr. Rogers." Tony's decided the bullshit between is just that: bullshit.  
"No one can even begin to thank you, Tony. You thought you were going to die when you put on that gauntlet."

  
Tony's breath catches in his throat and he tightens his hands into a fist as he tries to force back the memory of terrible, terrible pain exploding his body from the inside out. He remembers, vaguely, some kid asking if he should be on medication, and Tony responding, probably. Harley. He should check up on him.

  
"I did what needed to be done." He says shortly. It's become his standard response.  
"No, Tony, you don't get it." Steve says earnestly, quietly. He turns towards Tony. "When I first met you, I told you I knew guys worth ten of you, that you would never lay down on the wire and let the other guy walk over you."  
"Yeah, and I think I told you that you were a walking fashion disaster." Tony says thoughtfully.  
Steve chuckles.  
"I was. But not the point. The point is, I was wrong. You let the entire goddamn world walk over you. I thought I got you, that I understood how you worked. I was wrong."

  
"Huh." Tony says. He leans back and closes his eyes. He has vague memories of fading in and out of consciousness in a freezing bunker in Siberia. Somehow, they're not those people anymore. He snaps his eyes open and stares at the ceiling.  
"Can we just, uh, start clean?" Tony asks.  
Steve is very, very quiet.  
"You don't owe me that. You don't owe anyone anything." He says, after a few minutes.  
"It's not about owe, anymore. Can we just start over? I've had a very long few years, and I don't know if you've heard, but this purple guy threw a planet at me. I'm just trying to take some naps and watch TV for a while. Not to mention raise my daughter, who is very talkative and probably could do with an uncle who could keep up with her endless amounts of energy. Seriously, the kid never sleeps."  
Steve quirks a smile. "I think that's genetic. Okay. Let's start over."  
"Done deal. Now can you help back to my room? I've had enough emotions for one day."

* * *

 

And then it's two months later, and Tony is chopping vegetables for a salad while Peter does his homework at the table, Morgan coloring next to him, and Pepper and May grill outside. The prosthetic is as calibrated to a human hand as possible, but the minute differences bother Tony like grains of sand in a bed- nearly unnoticable, but when noticed, unbearable.

"I think this is the longest I've ever heard you go without talking, Pete." Tony teases.  
Peter shrugs.  
"I don't know. School's weird. MJ and Ned are there still, but it's just..."  
"Weird?" Tony supplies.  
"Yeah. I'm just, uh, having a little bit of a tough time getting used to it, I guess."  
"I think it'd be weirder if you weren't." Tony tosses the veggies into a a bowl and turns towards the fridge to get the dressing. When he turns back, Peter's vigorously scrubbing at his eyes like that'll stop Tony from noticing.

  
"Dad, Peter's crying!" Morgan supplies, putting her crayons down to grab Pete's hand.  
"I can see that, Morgoona. Why don't you go get him some tissues."  
Morgan nods and clambers down from her seat, shooting off to the bathroom.

  
Tony puts the knife down and sits down next to Peter, somewhat roughly running his hand through his hair to mess it up, hoping it'll make him smile.  
It doesn't, and Peter looks down to avoid meeting Tony's eyes.  
"You want me to get May?" Tony asks quietly.  
Peter shakes his head.  
"No, I just need like a minute. It's just a lot, you know?"  
"I know." Tony reaches out and pulls him into a hug, feeling the kid try and steady his breath.  
"I got tissues, Pete!" Morgan comes running back into the kitchen and climbs onto Peter's lap. With a look of solid concentration she wipes at his eyes. Peter finally laughs when she misses and pokes him in the eye.  
"Aw, thanks, Morgan."

  
"Everything okay in here?" Pepper and May come back in with steaks, and Tony watches May immediately process the scene in front of them. She had disappeared too, which for the least saved her the pain of losing Peter. Tony reaches out and ruffles Peter's hair again, this time succeeding in eliciting an annoyed look on his face as he reaches to fix it.  
"Yeah, everyone's good." Tony says. Pepper smiles and kisses Tony as she passes him, and they sit to have dinner together, finding some sense of normalcy in a desperately unnormal world.

**Author's Note:**

> I might continue this! We'll see lads. LMK. 
> 
> hmu on tumblr @ta1k-less. I'm having a two week long breakdown about endgame and how much I love Tony Stark.


End file.
